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This piece in the Times sums up Cruella and Jezza in my opinion.
Tick, tock, tick, tock. As if the crocodile in Peter Pan were swimming down the River Thames, you can almost hear the time passing in the Palace of Westminster. On Wednesday there will be just 100 days until Britain is legally committed to leaving the EU and only 46 days on which the House of Commons is due to be sitting. Time is running out for this constitutional crisis to be resolved and yet the prime minister and the leader of the opposition are conspiring to procrastinate. Both are irresponsibly putting narrow political concerns above the national interest to delay the moment of truth. Theresa May has postponed the Commons “meaningful vote” on her withdrawal agreement until the middle of next month because she knows she will lose it. After last week’s European Council it is abundantly clear that she cannot win the concessions she needs to get her deal through parliament, but she is still refusing to give MPs their say before Christmas, which makes it impossible for the deadlock to be confronted.
As prime minister, she should be trying to find a way out of the impasse and yet she insists she is not even contemplating any Plan B. Instead, she has denounced every other plausible alternative as an affront to democracy and embarked on a series of bizarre staged confrontations designed to show strength, which in fact only highlight her weakness. After her carefully choreographed showdown for the cameras with Jean-Claude Juncker came a personal attack on Tony Blair. It is, as Sam Gyimah, the former universities minister, said, “displacement activity” that is leaving the country in “limbo-land”. The only possible explanation is that Mrs May is trying to run down the clock so that MPs have no time to find a path between her deal and no deal. That is not just a shocking attempt to undermine the parliamentary sovereignty she claims to support, it also increases the chances of a dangerously disruptive hard Brexit.
With strange symmetry, Jeremy Corbyn is also dithering and prevaricating. Yesterday, Mr Corbyn told MPs that he intended to table a motion of no confidence in the prime minister — after he initially appeared to back away from the threat. But this is a piece of theatre, a meaningless gimmick with no legal force. If he wants to trigger a general election, the Labour leader needs to win a formal motion of no confidence in the whole government, not just a symbolic vote censuring Mrs May. Shadow cabinet ministers have repeatedly urged him to table such a motion but he has refused to do so because he knows that if he tries, and fails, to force a general election then he will have to decide whether or not to back a second referendum. With 117 Tory MPs now openly opposed to Mrs May’s leadership, it is hard to think of any circumstances more conducive to an opposition challenge, but the confidence motion is the “firewall”, as one senior figure puts it, between the Labour leader and a popular vote. “Anything not to be exposed as a Brexiteer to Labour Party members,” says a senior MP.
Mr Corbyn’s Eurosceptic instincts were obvious in a recent speech to the Party of European Socialists when he condemned the EU’s “support for austerity and failed neoliberal policies”, but on this he is at odds with the vast majority of his youthful supporters who are deeply pro-European and strongly in favour of another referendum.
This is not just a divide between centrists and Corbynistas but between different factions on the Labour left. The ideological purists in the leader’s office are attracted to the “creative destruction” of Brexit which they think might help bring about their revolution, whereas the political pragmatists worry that the disruption would make it harder to implement a radical programme if Labour does get into power. John McDonnell has become increasingly supportive of another referendum because “he’s wary of being the chancellor who has to implement Brexit”, according to one insider.
The parallels between Mrs May and Mr Corbyn are uncanny: the zombie prime minister is shadowed by a leader offering only an illusion of opposition. Both have survived leadership challenges from their MPs, and now cling stubbornly to power, isolated from large swathes of their party and with a bunker mentality setting in. Although socially awkward, they share a sense of moral superiority — the religiosity of the vicar’s daughter is mirrored by the spiritual certainty of the lifelong socialist. They pride themselves on being principled but in both cases the inflexibility is rapidly turning into their greatest weakness.
On Europe both are in denial about reality. Mrs May seems to think she can get substantial changes to her withdrawal agreement and Mr Corbyn appears to believe he can magically negotiate a “jobs first Brexit”, even though each of these options has been categorically ruled out by the EU. Both see the People’s Vote campaign as a sinister Blairite plot to undermine their leadership rather than acknowledging the constitutional clash between representative and direct democracy created by the 2016 referendum. There is, underlying the anxiety they display, a fundamental dishonesty in their positions. Mrs May is a Remainer who feels duty-bound to deliver the Brexit she once said would make the country poorer and less safe; Mr Corbyn is a long-standing Eurosceptic who feels politically obliged to oppose the UK’s departure from the EU because his party demands it of him. Neither is truly committed to the cause they have been forced to adopt. As Sir Ivan Rogers, the UK’s former permanent representative to the EU, put it in a speech last week: “The debate of the last 30 months has suffered from opacity, delusion-mongering and mendacity on all sides.”
So they twirl, Mrs May and Mr Corbyn, locked in a dance of death while the nation hangs in suspended animation. Crucial domestic policy reforms are on hold because the government is so preoccupied with Brexit that it can do nothing else. The green paper on social care, the long-term plan for the NHS and a review of school exclusions (which could have helped to tackle the knife crime crisis) were all supposed to have been published before Christmas but have been delayed. The rail network is in chaos, the welfare system is dysfunctional and a housing crisis goes unaddressed, yet to protect their own positions the prime minister and the leader of the opposition maintain the gridlock over Brexit. There is no alternative, Mrs May likes to suggest, echoing Margaret Thatcher. In fact, at a time when the country needs leadership more than ever, there is no government and there is no opposition. That is the real catastrophe.